Meanwhile, back in the Netherlands, King William and Queen Mary feared their nephew would become a target for his uncle’s religious pogroms. His presence at their court might even spark an open war between Holland and England. Consequently, no matter how genuinely fond of him they were, they told Monmouth he had to leave. Seeking advice from his friends and supporters, Monmouth finally came to the conclusion that his best course of action was to go to England, rally his old followers and friends from his time as captain-general of the army, and drive James from the throne. But like so many good plans, Monmouth was plagued by lack of funds. The most he could raise was £9,000, hardly enough to man and equip a mighty insurrection.
On the evening of 11 June 1685, three ships sailed into the English port of Lyme; on board were a mere eighty-three soldiers and a few horses. It was such a strange sight that it drew crowds of spectators. Only when they saw the Duke of Monmouth being rowed to shore did their silent stares turn to cheers and their numbers swell to thousands. People flocked to see him and hear him speak. At Lyme and Taunton he openly claimed that his uncle, whom he referred to as the Duke of York rather than James II, had constantly plotted against the Protestant religion and finally poisoned the king in order to take the throne. In short order Monmouth had attracted more than two thousand soldiers and nearly eight thousand civilian followers. All were anxious to take on the king’s army and put their hero on the throne.
Obviously, Monmouth believed that far greater numbers of soldiers would soon desert the crown and take up his banner; but people are fickle, and a known terror is always preferable to an unknown terror. The anticipated wave of followers and trained soldiers never appeared and those already with him slowly ebbed away through desertion and losses in a string of minor skirmishes with King James’s troops. By the time Monmouth’s army clashed with the royal forces at Sedgemoor on 5 July 1685, he had no more than seven thousand followers, more than five thousand of them untrained civilians.
Despite putting up a brave fight, Monmouth and his troops were no match for the king’s army. Within hours the rebels were routed, arrested, or killed. Monmouth himself had remained with the cavalry as long as possible, but in the end was forced to flee the field. At around 7 on the second morning after the battle, a detachment of soldiers discovered the Duke of Monmouth hiding in a ditch disguised in the smock of a common shepherd. As he huddled there, the captain read the arrest warrant: ‘James Duke of Monmouth . . . for High Treason in levying war against the King and assuming title to the Crown . . .’
If the outcome of Monmouth’s ill-fated coup is no great surprise, we are left with this question: if no one in the government supported the new king, who did he find to issue the arrest warrant for his nephew and force the bill through parliament? Obviously, even before coming to the throne James knew just how unpopular he was and how desperately he would need powerful support to prop up the questionable legality of his radical programmes. He also needed someone in a position of adequate power to keep the populace and parliament in line. The ‘someone’ who could do all these things was the barbarically cruel George Jeffreys, Lord Chief Justice of England.
Jeffreys’ early years had hardly been promising. He had spent most of his time at Cambridge’s law school drinking in local taverns where he bought endless rounds of drinks for the best and most influential of his classmates, amusing them with crude jokes and bawdy songs. Eventually, despite his feeble knowledge of the law and failure to complete his degree, his powerful classmates saw to it that Jeffreys was admitted to the Bar. By the time he took his place there in 1668, Jeffreys was either perpetually drunk, in a rage, or both, though it has to be admitted that his constant drinking was partly to relieve the pain of bladder stones that would only grow worse with the passing years. Taller than average, with a heavily pock-marked face and piercing eyes set beneath massive, bushy eyebrows, Jeffreys’ furious temper and razor sharp invective made him a master of scathing cross-examination, often reducing witnesses to tears in a matter of minutes by giving them what he called ‘a lick with the rough side of his tongue’. In court, Jeffreys harangued juries, twisted the rules and raged at defendants and witnesses whose testimony did not suit him.
Thanks to his peculiar talents, Jeffreys quickly made a name for himself and rose to national prominence towards the end of Charles II’s reign. Despite Jeffreys’ notoriety, King Charles never trusted him, saying that he had ‘no learning, no sense, no manners and more impudence than ten whores’. But Jeffreys served the crown doggedly both to please the king and the Bar and, most importantly, to advance himself. Eventually Charles bowed to pressure from the Bar and allowed Jeffreys to be made Lord Chief Justice of England in 1683. Long before attaining the highest legal post in the land Jeffreys had been busy making enemies in parliament by impeding the implementation of one law after another, and even attempting to prevent parliament from coming into session. As early as November 1680 parliament had passed a resolution stating, in part: ‘Sir George Jeffreys, by traducing and obstructing . . . the sitting of Parliament . . . [so] that the king should be requested to remove him out of all public office.’
Once effectively in control of the British legal system, Jeffreys instituted a reign of terror the likes of which had not been seen since the rule of Bishop Bonner under Queen Mary Tudor well over a century earlier. Even members of the nobility went to the block without the benefit of a proper trial. In June 1684, he condemned Sir Thomas Armstrong to the block for treason with no trial whatsoever. When Armstrong demanded a trial to prove his innocence, Jeffreys snapped: ‘That you shall have, by the Grace of God.’ Then turning to the bailiff, said: ‘See that execution be done on next Friday.’
When James became king in March 1685 he undoubtedly recognised a kindred spirit in the vicious Judge Jeffreys and immediately gave him a seat in the House of Lords, making him the first Chief Justice since the thirteenth century to be so honoured and blatantly integrating the power of the judiciary with that of Parliament. With this new honour, Jeffreys’ power and access to the king surpassed that of both the Corporation of London and the Lord Mayor, making him the virtual dictator of the capital. Now, anyone who voiced even the mildest criticism of the new Catholic regime would answer to Jeffreys and his production-line justice. In September of the same year, King James appointed him Lord Chancellor, giving him control of the nation’s treasury.
To instil a proper sense of terror in defendants and witnesses alike, Jeffreys hung the walls of his court with scarlet tapestries. At his bench there was only one acceptable plea to any charge – guilty. Anything else was a waste of the court’s precious time. At criminal trials, there was only one verdict – guilty, and one sentence – execution. Defendants appearing before him were routinely sentenced to death without being allowed to present a defence and sent to their execution without being given time to meet a clergyman, make confession or even say their prayers.
Throughout the country fear and panic rose to a fever pitch as people began to fear a return to the public puritanical witch trials of the Commonwealth. Obligingly, Jeffreys did everything he could to confirm their fears. When the Duke of Monmouth attempted to wrest control of the country from King James, it was Judge George Jeffreys who signed the arrest warrant and forced it through parliament. It was a perfect opportunity to prove once and for all the effectiveness of justice under King James II.
After Monmouth’s arrest he was taken to London and locked in the Tower where his wife and three children were waiting for him, having been arrested four days earlier, on 9 July. At his arraignment, Jeffreys informed Monmouth that having attempted to seize the crown negated his right to a trial; his execution would take place in two days. Monmouth begged his uncle for an audience and, amazingly, James agreed. It was a shameful affair. Monmouth attempted to blame the entire rising on those around him, saying, ‘my misfortune was such as to meet with some horrid people that made me believe things of your Majesty, and gave me so many false arguments that I was fully led to believe it was a shame and a sin before God not to do it.’ He added that if his life were spared he would show James ‘how zealous I shall ever be in your service’. He even offered to convert to Catholicism. For all his own cruelty, the king was disgusted by this display of cowardice. The execution would take place in two days’ time.
At 10 a.m. on 15 July 1685, an armed guard escorted the Duke of Monmouth from the Tower to Tower Hill where he was to mount a scaffold draped in black bunting especially for the occasion. Along the route, more than three thousand of the young duke’s supporters had gathered to witness the grisly spectacle. So fearful was the king of an attempt to rescue his nephew that he had ordered the guard to shoot Monmouth dead if there were any disturbances in the crowd before the execution was complete. For a man about to die, the duke’s manner was unnervingly calm and composed. When the entourage mounted the scaffold, the two bishops who accompanied the condemned man began a prayer. Although Monmouth dutifully repeated their words, he refused to pray for the salvation of the king, only muttering ‘amen’ when they had finished. In a break with established custom, he refused to make a final speech, handing a prepared statement to one of the bishops to read to the crowd. As he approached the block, he also refused the customary blindfold.
Before kneeling to place his head on the block, Monmouth calmly bent down and pulled the executioner’s axe from under a pile of straw. Lifting it up, he ran his finger along the edge and turned to the headsman, the notorious Jack Ketch, asking if he thought it was sharp enough to do the job properly. Staring at his victim with disbelief, Ketch was even more astonished when Monmouth handed him the exorbitant sum of 6 guineas, saying: ‘Pray, do your business well. Do not serve me as you did my Lord Russell. I have heard you struck him four or five times; if you strike me twice, I cannot promise you not to stir.’ He then turned to one of his servants and told him that if Ketch did a clean job he was to receive 6 more guineas. With that, he knelt down and placed his head on the block.
Ketch, unnerved by Monmouth’s calmness and casual attitude, completely bungled the job. When the first blow only grazed the back of the duke’s head, he turned his blood-covered face upward, staring directly into Ketch’s eyes. Two more blows had still not finished the horrid job and in anger and frustration Ketch threw down the axe, declaring that he would pay 40 guineas to anyone in the angry crowd who could do the job better. It was only when the Sheriff of Middlesex, who was standing on the platform, demanded that Ketch finish his job or be killed on the spot, that he retrieved the axe and struck another ill-aimed blow. According to an eyewitness, ‘the butcherly dog did so barbarously act his part that he could not, at five strokes sever the head from the body’. Finally, in exasperation, Ketch used his belt knife to sever the duke’s head from his body and put the condemned man out of his misery.
By now, the crowd’s anger had turned to fury. Their young hero had been butchered like a hog. Pushing and shoving their way past the ring of guards, they stormed the scaffold, dragging Jack Ketch to the ground, threatening to tear him limb from limb. Before the guards could control the situation and rescue the executioner, dozens of people had dipped their handkerchiefs in Monmouth’s blood as though he were a holy martyr to the Protestant cause. To make the already grotesque situation even worse, Monmouth’s family now realised that the duke had never had his portrait painted. After retrieving the body, they had the head sewn back on the stump and propped up long enough for an artist’s rendering to be made. Only then was the body returned to the Tower for burial in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula.
Undoubtedly the anger of the crowd and the horrible scene at the execution led King James to fear a general insurrection even more than he had before. In council with his enforcer, Judge Jeffreys, the king decided to make an example of Monmouth’s followers and put the fear of God into anyone else who might contemplate driving him from the throne. If the job could be done effectively enough, it might even enable him to disband parliament and re-establish an absolute monarchy. The plan so appealed to James that he promptly ordered the Royal Mint to strike a medal celebrating his nephew’s execution.
Even before Monmouth’s execution, George Jeffreys had begun working hard to rout out Monmouth’s supporters and everyone however remotely associated with them. Even by the harsh standards of the seventeenth century, he fulfilled his task beyond all limits of sanity, and did so with ghoulish delight. The next assize (the name given to any particular, periodic session of court) would be dedicated entirely to the trials of Monmouth supporters.
Conducting his proceedings with such blatant disregard for legal procedure that they became known as the ‘Bloody Assizes’, Jeffreys condemned three hundred and twenty men to execution and sentenced another eight hundred and forty-one to be sent to the West Indies where they would be sold as slaves. Even a group of schoolgirls who had once handed Monmouth bouquets of flowers were sentenced to a near lethal flogging. The trials were conducted like some nightmarish production line, with the first hundred victims having been put to death within a week of the uprising’s collapse. To make all this effort worth his while, Jeffreys extorted a small fortune from the families of his victims with false promises of leniency. On many occasions he claimed the entire estate of his victims for himself even before they had been sent to the block or the gallows. By the end of the Bloody Assizes, Jeffreys boasted that he had sentenced more men to execution than all his predecessors combined since the Norman Conquest.
While the Bloody Assizes held England in terror, the king delighted in following Jeffreys’ adventures in court; insisting that he write a brief account of each day’s proceedings and have them couriered to the palace so that James could use them to entertain his dinner guests. Thanks to his ruthless administration of the ‘law’, Jeffreys gathered quite a list of honours: to his existing titles of Lord Chief Justice of England and Lord Chancellor were now added Member of the Privy Council and Baron Jeffreys of Wem.